Balanced' Coverage

The Republican campaign to wipe out any vestigial alternative to free-

The Republican campaign to wipe out any vestigial alternative
to free-market ideology and culture in the United States has now
become at least as broad, comprehensive, and relentless as any
Stalinist or Maoist campaign against religion or free-thinking
ever was. In the last few months, this campaign has reached its
climax as the heavily armed culture warriors of the Right have
moved in on the last nonprofit strongholds in public
broadcasting.

According to a May 2 article in The New York Times,
there are now political commissars at PBS (they call them
"ombudsmen"). These are Party operatives assigned to
police the political content of news and public affairs
programming. Theyre looking for "balance." So far
thats meant that 30 minutes of fair and independent
reporting focused mostly on the environmental and human costs of
the free market (the tragically shrunken post-Moyers NOW
program) has to be followed by 30 minutes handed over to the
hard-right propagandists of The Wall Street Journal
editorial page. Kenneth Tomlinson, the Bush-appointed chair of
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has served notice that
the investigative reporting done on the weekly series Frontline
will be similarly "balanced" in the future. Eventually
all of this will probably mean a flood of corporate-subsidized
propaganda that will dwarf the puny efforts of private
foundations. PBS will become an official state mouthpiece, the
evil twin of the old Tass News Agency in the Soviet Union.

There has, thus far, been no bloodshed in this Cultural
Revolution. But when youve got billions of dollars and
every commercial cable channel at your disposal, a bullet in the
back of the head is needlessly messy. The Forces of the Market
can simply eliminate independent brain function while keeping the
average American body alive and consuming.

WE MUST ADMIT that the revolutionaries of the Right have been
patient. Their campaign for media hegemony makes Maos Long
March look like a 40-yard dash. It began almost 25 years ago, in
the Reagan era, with a wave of media deregulation that trashed
limits on commercial minutes per hour and broadcast license
requirements for public service and political fairness. In the
past decade, the Party has achieved its goal of repealing
meaningful restrictions on monopoly ownership of media outlets
and mounted crippling attacks on the National Endowments for the
Arts and Humanities.

While the hard-core revolutionaries have wielded the levers of
state power against dissent, the Party apparatus has worked
through various talk-radio programs and other front organizations
to mount a repetitive drumbeat of dogmatic condemnation and
personal invective against any voice of dissent.
"Feminazis...political correctness...reverse
discrimination...LIBERAL!" These code words became as
powerful as were "running dog," "bourgeois
individualist," or "Trotskyite" under Stalin or
Mao.

Today the pincers of this inside-outside strategy are closing,
and the last commercial-free slice of the broadcast spectrum has
been colonized.

None of this is to say that PBS was ever really any center of
resistance to corporate power in America. In fact, over the past
15 years, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has
thoroughly documented a pattern of pro-business bias in PBS
public affairs shows. PBS affiliates regularly air a lineup of
business and investment shows. But Kenneth Tomlinson is not
crying out for a "Nightly Labor Report" to balance
these. On economic stories, FAIR found that 75 percent of the
sources presented on PBS were from corporations or Wall Street,
while only 1.5 percent were from labor unions (who do still
represent about 13 percent of the U.S. workforce).

FAIR also found that PBS cheerfully presented hours of
corporate-funded documentaries extolling the economics of the
free market. The 2002 globalization series Commanding Heights,
funded by BP, FedEx, and Enron, was an especially egregious
example. Meanwhile, documentaries partially funded by labor
unions were rejected solely because of the union taint.

This pro-corporate imbalance on PBS was, in fact, one of the
wrongs that NOW with Bill Moyers set out to right. Now
weve got Moyers replacement, poor David Brancaccio,
with 30 minutes in which to "balance" every other
channel on the dial. And the day draws nigh when it will become
impossible, in this once-great land, to think an un-sponsored
thought.

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